The story of this house reaches back to colonial land grants. The property traces to a 1663 patent from Lord Baltimore in what was then New Scotland Hundred, part of the Province of Maryland. After the Residence Act of 1790 created the new federal capital, Daniel Carroll and Robert Sewall acquired the lots. Sewall built the main house in 1799 and 1800, likely designed by architect Leonard Harbaugh, who had submitted the first design for the U.S. Capitol. The result was an Adam Federal-style home grafted onto a farmhouse dating to about 1750. Though the Sewall family rarely lived there, the house attracted prominent tenants -- among them Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury under Jefferson and Madison, and Reverdy Johnson, U.S. Senator and Attorney General. It is the oldest house still standing in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Tradition holds that British troops set the house ablaze during the War of 1812, provoked by gunfire from within or behind the residence. Robert Sewall sought federal compensation for the damage; Congress refused. He repaired the house himself in 1820 and died there that December. The building passed through his daughters and their descendants, the Daingerfields, who added a half-mansard roof in 1879. It sat empty from 1912 until 1922, when Vermont Senator Porter H. Dale purchased it and gutted the interior for a thorough renovation -- new floors, bathrooms, enclosed porches, and modernized kitchens. The house had been reborn before, and it would be again.

The National Woman's Party, led by the formidable Alice Paul, had purchased the Old Capitol Building in 1921 for $150,000 to serve as headquarters. But when eminent domain proceedings seized that property in the late 1920s to build the Supreme Court, wealthy benefactor Alva Vanderbilt Belmont stepped in. In 1927 she paid Senator Dale $100,000 cash for an option on the Sewall house, and in 1929 she exercised it. The NWP accepted $299,200 in condemnation proceeds for their old headquarters and moved in. Renamed the Alva Belmont House at the party's convention on December 6, 1929, the building was renovated and dedicated with a bronze plaque in December 1930. Alice Paul and other activists both lived and worked within its walls, organizing campaigns for the Equal Rights Amendment and other causes.

The government tried repeatedly to demolish or condemn the building. In 1955, the Senate considered seizing it for underground security vaults beneath the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Local residents and the Capitol Hill Restoration Society fought back. In 1965, a senator proposed buying it as a residence for the Vice President, but opponents said it was too small and too close to the Capitol. Most dramatically, construction of the Hart Senate Office Building in the late 1960s threatened to swallow the site entirely. Architectural historian L. Morris Leisenring argued that adjacent structures included former slave quarters and a tobacco barn worth preserving, persuading the House of Representatives to spare the complex. Congress eventually exempted the house from property taxation and provided preservation funds, though budget cuts often delayed the work.

On April 12, 2016, President Barack Obama designated the house a national monument, renaming it the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument after Alva Belmont and Alice Paul. Financier David Rubenstein pledged $1 million to the National Park Foundation for its restoration. The house, located at 144 Constitution Avenue NE near Union Station, continues to hold the National Woman's Party collection -- an extensive library on women's suffrage, the NWP archive, and exhibits of art and memorabilia. After a period of closure for conservation, it reopened in August 2023. Over two centuries, this unassuming brick house has witnessed the founding of a capital, a British invasion, the long fight for women's suffrage, and the broader struggle for equality -- absorbing each chapter into its walls like the salvaged bricks in its garden.